


7 Years Gone

by mageofmind (renegadeartist)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: POV Second Person, post the eleventh hour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 16:08:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8630569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegadeartist/pseuds/mageofmind
Summary: In which Roswell explores the world, stumbles upon Phandalin, and discovers that the moon is not as big as they once thought.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I had the sudden urge to write Roswell, who I also love with my whole being, so have this. Also, if anyone's wondering where the next chapter of my Angus fic is,,, I'm working on it, but it's being really difficult, so sorry for the delay. If you see any glaring errors, feel free to point them out, but I hope you enjoy.

Faerûn is beautiful. More beautiful than you expected it to be.

There are sweeping hills, grasses waving at the sky, and bare trees with barely any leaves to protect you from the sun. There are mountains too high for you to fly over, because suddenly your lungs can’t drag in enough air, and it’s such a drastic change, because you’re not trapped in a bubble barely a mile high, you’re not tied to a huge, strong, supportive body, you’re not fueled by some kind of ancient, powerful magic that no one can understand. You find that you get hungry, you get tired, and you’ve lost the drive to protect things like you once did. 

Faerûn is beautiful, but so much bigger than you thought anything could ever be.

You left Refuge not too long ago, and June had smiled and waved, as had everyone else who hadn’t run as far and as fast as they could once the barrier was gone. You wanted to see the world, and everyone had agreed, but you find that you couldn’t have ever anticipated the sheer size of it all.

You find yourself over a lake, or maybe it’s an ocean, you can’t tell (it’s not like you’ve ever had the opportunity to see either of them), and there’s nothing but water on all sides, water and sky and blues and blacks and whites, and there’s nothing there, nothing to focus on, and you feel terribly small and fragile and weak, and you can’t do this anymore, you can’t.

You find a fishing boat, and you land on one of its masts, and hide in the folds for a few days, listening to the chatter of human fishermen that argue and laugh and yell. They don’t sound like the people you’re used to hearing, they’re strange, but they’re still voices, and they drown out the white noise of the sea, of the empty expanses of nothing, of all the space that has existed forever, but for you might as well have just been created.

It strikes you, not for the first time, that this is the first time you’ve seen the outside world, that you’ve seen anything but sand and sandstone and the dusty wooden buildings of Refuge. This is the first time you’ve been free, and you find it’s not something you enjoy.

There is too much of everything, and after years of the same town, the same day, over and over, rattling around in your tiny, fragile bird head, it’s too much.

There are too many people you’ll never know, too many places you’ll never see, because the world is too big, and deserts and oceans stretch on for miles and miles, nothing living there but the fish that occasionally break the surface or the sand colored rodents that duck for cover under rocks. You wonder how the people of Refuge could have ever accepted such a small compromise, how they could have been content with their tiny slice of a world with so much diversity and life.

You get your answer, as you’re flying over a few towns, vaguely following a trading road slowly winding north.

Suddenly, underneath you, is nothing but blackness, and abyss, a terrible blemish on the land that you find you can’t really focus on. You circle around, because there was something here, there was death here, and there was something precious here that someone failed to save.

There are no more loops, no more Junebug, and at least two thirds of you has been destroyed. You feel something like the magic that held you together, but made to destroy, not to protect, and suddenly you realize how the crippling fear of things unknown could push people to accept a slice of the world a mile wide as the scope of their reality, because this crater and what it means is more terrifying than a giant purple worm, because you can understand a giant purple worm. You can't understand the abyss that stares back at you, unchanging and unrelenting.   


There is a blackened tree on the edge of the large glass crater, and you alight on one of its branches, and you forget for a moment that you barely weigh anything, and expect the tree to come crashing down under your weight. Of course, it doesn’t.

You can see yourself, in the reflective surface of the glass, and it’s warped and wavy, even though the surface is completely smooth. You wonder why you're not running.  


There’s a crackling in your head, like static. Like what the visitors had brought with them, when they’d stumbled into Refuge, and broke the monotony of dying over and over and over for seven years.

You feel something here, oppressive and terrible and sad, and the huge space of nothing over the glass is worse than the ocean, because even the ocean had life in it, somewhere.

Here, there is nothing. No birds fly overhead, they all got a message you can’t hear, and there are no small animals or bandits making camp. There are no weeds pushing up through the cracks, mostly because there are no cracks.

You feel death here, and you realize with a start that this crater is the same size as Refuge.

You feel a strange tightness coil in your chest, cold and foreboding and terrible, and you wonder how different things would have been if whatever had caused this destruction had made it into Refuge instead of a chalice that fateful day.

You decide not to dwell on that, because you suppose it would mean you would never have existed, at least not as Roswell. You’d still be one of the birds that call the sky their home, you’d still have a purpose in life. You wouldn’t be so hopelessly lost.

You think that, maybe, you can go back to Refuge, but seven years is a long time to live the same day over and over again, and you’re not sure you’re ready to go back, not yet, not after you’ve left and seen what the world has to offer.

You look up at the sky, and the two moons are starting to fade into the sky as the sun sinks lower.

You wonder if you’ll fare better on the moon than in this huge expanse of land and people that you’ll never be able to see, much less protect.

You figure that the only way to find out for sure is to start flying upward, and the moon is, you discover, smaller than it looks, and the architects seem to have an affinity for domes. It almost,  _ almost _ feels like home.


End file.
